A click-to-call system which enables a user to automatically initiate a telephone call simply by clicking a phone number or URL displayed on a screen of a terminal has been developed. The click-to-call system allows a user to, for example, readily make an inquiry about the current Web page (an example of a document) the user is browsing.
However, because users have become able to readily make inquiries, the following problem has arisen. For example, when an employee of a company uses click-to-call to make an inquiry about a confidential document to be kept secret from anyone outside of the company, the telephone call can be connected to a person in charge of the document who is outside of the company. In such a case, the person in charge cannot describe details of the document to the calling employee and so the calling employee and the person in charge cannot successfully communicate with each other because the person in charge is from outside of the company. In such a situation, both the employee making the inquiry and the person receiving the inquiry are confused.
On the other hand, a person in charge who receives the inquiry may unknowingly talk about the details of the confidential document. This can lead to leakage of the confidential information and can severely damage the business. The problem is not limited to click-to-call; the problem can occur in any other telephone call initiation.
To prevent the problem, initiation of calls from a company to outside the company, that is, redirection of intra-company calls to outside numbers, may be inhibited. However, this method also prevents employees from making calls that are not related to confidential information and impairs the convenience of mobile phones.
Therefore, a system has been proposed for controlling connection of communication links based on information in which the states of both calling and called users are reflected in order to connect only communications useful to the users (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-279218, for example).